Whatamieating.com

About the site – what's in it and why;
pronunciation & acknowledgements

Suzy Oakes, the creator of this database, last updated it on 6th May 2011. Her description of the project is given below.

What is contained in whatamieating.com?

whatamieating.com contains 67,431 entries in 307 languages plus a further 42,027 where plurals have been coded.

The website gives information about food and food related items ranging from a Swahili name for a corkscrew (cha kazibulia) or a Norwegian word for a tin-opener (boks-åpner) to some details about a Bengali festival celebrating the harvest (nabanno); from information about what constitutes a 'bottle' to words for different types of flavour in multiple languages; from obscure Brazilian cocktails (batida de maracujá) to descriptions of Japanese haute cuisine governed by rituals of numbers, beauty and exquisite food (kaiseki ryöri); from descriptions of 155 different types of consommé in France to 18 different names for fish sauce in South East Asia.

The main aim of whatamieating.com?

The main aim of whatamieating.com is to help people trying to find an English translation of something unknown to them in a foreign language. (Again, bear in mind that we are only a third of the way through the proposed eventual list of foods). So that if you are in a German restaurant or a Portuguese fish shop or (eventually) a Cantonese market, you should be able to type in the name of the food or name of a dish (or a phonetic version of it) and find a description, in some cases with a photograph.

The secondary aim is to describe things well known to us in English, such as what a pineapple is or what are the main constituents of steak and kidney pudding (er – steak, kidneys, …) This is a lower priority.

There is no aim to include recipes except in very rare cases. There are hundreds of recipes available for something like 'coq au vin' and although I know which is my favourite (Simon Hopkinson's), I prefer to leave people to work out who has written their own personal favourite version. My aim is simply to describe the main constituent ingredients.

Completion

We consider the website to be about a third of its eventual size. It is complete (as much as anything can be complete) approximately as follows:

A95%
B95%
C60%
D–Z25%

Except that the following are 95% complete:

Danish

Finnish

Icelandic

Indian Languages (17, including Hindi and Urdu)

Italian

Portuguese

Norwegian

Swedish

Pronunciation

I have developed a system of pronunciation based on those which I have found easiest to use in other publications. There are inherent problems in some languages. Take Spanish. I have, throughout, used 's' as the sound associated with 's', 'z' and 'c' (in most cases). However, in some parts of Spain the 's' sound would invariably be softened to 'th' or 'dh'. I thought it best to leave the sound as 's' and allow you to decide whether you would yourself soften it to 'th', depending on where you are in Spain.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The website has been developed by Jane Skinner who has not only carried out this work with thoroughness and good humour, but who has been hugely supportive since the work started on the database in 1998. I have also been greatly helped and supported by Jenny (and Terry) McCann. Barry Widmer gave tuition in the use of Access without which this would never have been possible. Steve O'Rahilly has been Steve O'Rahilly and has made the transition from thinking of this as a 'little hobby' to regarding it as a 'work of scholarship' with warmth and generosity. I also owe thanks (but nothing else!!) to Michael Holyoke and Catherine Clark for advice and interest. Adeline Douard arrived on the scene in 2008 and embarked on proof-reading the French list with huge energy and attention, and has made suggestions about how to make whatamieating.com and "Food for Travellers" more accessible to the public. She has worked tirelessly for whatamieating.com and greatly improved the quality of the French list, and pressurised many of her kind friends to record sounds for the website, distribute cards throughout France and the like. Aurélie Chapain joined us for a few months and started the very complicated work of producing a French version of the website. This did not just involve straightforward translation but a thorough understanding of the structure of the site and the complexity of the dataset.

Various people have read text and checked specific languages, or have made other contributions. To these people I am greatly indebted. They include:

In addition, thanks are due to the many traders and restaurateurs who allowed me to photograph foods and food-related items. These include:

Additional acknowledgement

Since Suzy wrote this, Mark Iliff (https://talespinner.co.uk/services/) amended the CSS in 2026 to make the site responsive for mobiles and other narrow screens.

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